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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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The parsimonious explanation is that an extra 1 billion dollars given to Ethiopians is immediately spent on consumption, mostly on imported goods.

Definitely nice for the Ethiopians who benefited, but I doubt they made any progress on fixing entrenched problems.

We simply must get past the idea that government/NGO spending does anything useful unless we can closely track it and see the progress. Allocating funds != accomplishing goals. Look at California High Speed Rail. This applies doubly in corrupt countries.

Yes, to be clear when I said USAID money was definitely doing something I don't mean to imply that "something" is good. My default assumption with untracked aid money is the "something" is being used by the government in charge to hand out bribes to their friends.

I'd expect that removing the spigot of money results in more political upheaval since the group in charge has less of an ability to bribe people into being allies. And they either have to make that up through increased extraction from their enemies, or reduce their bribing amount. Both of which make their position weaker.

I just ultimately don't think it should be the responsibility of the US taxpayer to worry about these things. So I'm happy to see the program ended.

Education would be another one. I'm generally not prone to trying to correct the misconceptions of normies in the course of my daily life, but one thing I do bring up from time to time is that additional funding for education generally has little to no effect on outcomes. I encourage them to google that. Because it's something they can immediately grasp (and be shocked by), some even do so!

Doesn't precipitate any major political changes but once I was lucky enough to observe, afterward, that when the subject ("We just need more money for schools!") came up again in a group setting the freshly-pilled normie sat quietly with a distressed look on his face.

From such beginnings, perhaps...

This has me thinking about taxonomy. In this context, let me suggest:

Normie: One who derives political/policy opinions from ambient social consensus
Midwit: One who does the above, but is smart enough to search for supporting (never conflicting) data
Contrarian: One who, driven by reflexive disgust at normie consensus-assumption, searches for conflicting data

There's no tension between being a midwit and being a contrarian. Indeed, a tremendous amount of contrarianism is simply reversing popular or intuitive assumptions, seeking data that supports the beliefs they arrived at for fundamentally emotional/ideological reasons, and scoffing at the naivete of people who accept the convention claims.

I almost want to say real education spending has never been tried. Literally though a big issue is the cities with lot of money have powerful teacher unions that just find ways to gobble up the money to their members.

The data is really bad on more money and schools. The one thing that has me seeing a little daylight is it appears Mississippi has actually succeeded at fixing the schools.

They fixed it via ending social promotion and by mandating phonics, right? Did they do anything else? Without looking it up, I would assume their spending is very low by US standards.

They imposed strict discipline and consistent standards. Mississippi is one of the few places where corporal punishment is still normal in schools.

I mostly agree spending hasn’t been important in US education. Learning is mostly having a floor of resources and then independently grinding thru a textbook.

But I would still say spending more hasn’t been tried. Because the blue cities turned their schools into job programs.

This is how it usually goes down for me.

NPC: We need more tax money for our underfunded public schools

Me: How much do you think insert local ghetto spends per student?

NPC: I don't know, $3000?

Me: They spend $34,000 per student per year. There's 20 kids to a class, so that's $680,000 per teacher.

NPC: Nevertheless

I've encountered similar (but in reverse) with people arguing the US needs to reduce military spending (especially among people who are otherwise supportive of NATO).

The USA is definitely getting little bang for its buck procurement wise.

Yeah, people are shocked when they learn that defense is only like 15% of federal spending and most of that is just social programs and salaries as well.

We spend almost as much on veterans disability (much of which is fraud) as we do on weapons procurement.

And a lot of the weapons procurement budget is being spent inside the US so it's less evaporative than foreign aid

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